FAQ: Linux version

I'm getting the error: "SetVideoMode failed: Couldn't find matching GLX visual"

You can test if openGL works with a simple 3D application that comes with XFree86/X.org:

glxgears

For more information about troubleshooting 3D acceleration:

http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/OpenGL#Troubleshooting_3D_hw_accel

Joysticks don't work in the Linux version.

Some notes courtesy of Aaron VonderHaar:

* Depending on SDL compile-time options, it may only be looking for /dev/js?.

* If the system has devfs, then the joysticks may actually be in /dev/js/? or /dev/input/js? -- I couldn't figure out how to tell SDL where to look, so I ended up making symlinks (e.g. /dev/js0 => /dev/js/0 or /dev/input/js0).

* Check that the necessary joystick modules aren't properly loaded.

* There are latency issues with the parallel port joystick driver.

When I run under RedHat 9, I get the error "libmad.so.0 is missing"

You can get the libmad RPM for RedHat 9 here.

When I run under Linux, I get the error "SDL 1.2.6 is required"

Depending on your Linux distribution (Redhat, SuSE, etc.), see if do a search in their package listing for "SDL". Install the latest release of SDL 1.2.6.

RedHat and Mandrake users can get RPMs for SDL here: SDL SDL-devel.

When I run under Linux, I get the error "error while loading shared libraries: libSDL_image-1.2.so.0"

Depending on your Linux distribution (Redhat, SuSE, etc.), see if do a search in their package listing for "SDL". Install the latest release of SDL-image 1.2.

I'm having problems getting sound to work in Linux with KDE

KDE is a desktop environment; ALSA and OSS are sound systems. KDE has its own sound layer, but we don't use it--we use the system interface.

Now, some people might have some difficulty getting StepMania and KDE's sound to both run at once: StepMania plays sounds directly to the hardware (hw:0), and not through the default interface (default), since going through dmix has traditionally caused problems. That means that if your hardware doesn't support hardware mixing, only one or the other can play at once, and KDE might be one of those "keep audio open all the time" apps. You can override this by setting "SoundDevice=default" in StepMania.ini, to see if it works properly now.

If the above doesn't help, kill the "artsd" process (which is the KDE sound layer). You can also run the program, prefixing it with "artsdsp" which redirects accesses to the system sound through the arts layer.

The error "./stepmanierror while loading shared libraries: liblua.so"

You need to install the packages for liblua50 and liblualib50. See your distribution's documentation for how to find and install new packages.

Movies don't play, and in the log I see "WARNING: Unknown movie driver name: FFMpeg"

You need to install the ffmpeg-devel package. Then, reconfigure and recompile.

I never trust binaries; how hard is it to compile this program from source?

It's pretty easy to compile from source so long as you are comfortable downloading packages for your version of Linux. For RedHat/Mandrake, you should be familiar with rpm. For Debian/Ubuntu/Kubuntu, you should know about the synaptic package manager or the apt-get command. (Dunno about other Linuxes.)

Download the StepMania source files and run the configure program. It will tell you what you are missing. Note that you'll be wanting development (-dev) versions of the missing packages. For example, you'll need liblua50-dev and liblualib50-dev, not just liblua50.

Once configure has run cleanly, then run make. If you are compiling StepMania 3.9 with a version of GCC 4, make sure you do NOT use optimizations above -O1, as this causes songs to loop forever. This bug is not present in StepMania 4.0. When it has run perfectly, you'll find two programs in the src/ directory: GtkModule.so and stepmania. Now, you need to set up all the directories that stepmania expects to find. And you'll want some starter data files. Probably the easiest way to get these and set them up is simply to download the the Stepmania binary tar.gz. (!) Once you've unpacked it, simply replace its version of GtkModule.so and stepmania with your freshly compiled ones.

cd to the directory and incant ./stepmania

Will StepMania run on my machine?

If you can already run other 3D games, you'll be able to run StepMania. If you've never run a 3D game before, go to a terminal window and run:

   glxinfo 

Look for the line "direct rendering". If it shows "yes", you will likely have no problems at all. If it says "no", you need new driver software for your video card or you will get the dreaded message::

 "Your system is reporting that direct rendering is not available.  Please
 obtain an updated driver from your video card manufacturer."

How do I get a driver that does direct rendering (and why don't the default Linux drivers work)?

Direct rendering on video cards is done by proprietary software. The companies will not release open source versions and no-one else has written an open source version. Linux, by default, only distributes open source software so the default drivers do not do direct rendering. However, I hear that a new driver, due to be released in 2006, will work properly.... we'll see!

The drivers: nVidia video cards: If you have one of these, your life is easy. Get your Linux driver from http://www.nvidia.com/content/drivers/drivers.asp. It should work.

ATI video cards: If your video card is new, you will, with luck, be able to find a driver on the ATI site: http://www.ati.com/support/driver.html, but it may well be a pain to set up and cause bugs, particularly with suspend-to-ram (sleep/standby).

Configuring X to use the drivers: You will need to modify your X config file to load the correct drivers and operate their options. The config file is either called xorg.conf or XF86Config.conf and you'll normally find it under /etc/X11. FIRST, SAVE YOUR EXISTING FILE. You never know -- you may want it again!!! The config file mods vary with your driver. I found excellent information on this on the Ubuntu forum. If you don't use Ubuntu and cannot find specific info for your Linux package, check the Ubuntu forum anyway; lots of the info there is relevant to all versions of Linux http://www.ubuntuforums.org/. Search for HOWTO nvidia or HOWTO ATI.

R200 Open Source Drivers

Current open source Mesa 6.5 R200 drivers (ATI 8500 series) should work fine with stepmania. (250fps avg with default settings on demo) (AMD AthlonXP 2600+)

Can I run StepMania in a version of Windows on VMware/Virtual PC?

Perhaps. In general, these systems don't support 3D acceleration, but that may be changing. The January 2006 issue of Linux Journal has an article on running Windows games in Linux (p 48). Check it out.

StepMania performs poorly in Linux, espeically with older video cards

The video card or video driver is almost always the bottleneck.

Generally, if using a driver from Nvidia or ATI, performance will be as good in Linux as in Windows. When using DRI drivers, especially with older video cards, performance will likely be worse than using the same video card with Windows video drivers.

Stepmania crashing on a dual core (or otherwise SMP) setup

Some people have had issues with SMP Linux setups crashing when running Stepmania. Currently, this problem can be solved by assigning Stepmania and affinity to a single processor.

To do this, first get schedutils using your package manager.

For example, on Gentoo Linux you can use:

# emerge schedutils

Or on Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Fluxbuntu, Debian, etc:

# apt-get install schedutils

Then you can launch Stepmania with a bitmask telling Linux which processor(s) to use with taskset. Generally, to fix this issue you will want to pick only one processor. These masks are in hexidecimal, like so: 0x00000001 which will bind it to processor 0. So, to run it on processor 0, run:

$ taskset 0x00000001 ./stepmania

You can alternately run it on any other single processor unit (0x00000002, 0x00000004, etc), but the above should fix the problem.